Desegregating Black Schools: Everybody Benefits From It

Because all knowledge and skills are partial, neither majority nor minority groups are self-sufficient. In desegregated schools, whites learn from minorities, and minorities learn from whites.

Despite increasing cynicism about the effectiveness of desegregation, ''the research shows that desegregation has positive consequences for children,'' said Willis Hawley of Vanderbilt University.

For example, between 1967 and 1977, Hawley found a ''dramatic 50 percent decline in the dropout rate of black students.'' Desegregation increases friendly interracial contact and ''does not lead to significant increases in school violence.''

On the basis of my examination of school desegregation in several cities, including Boston, where I was a court-appointed master, and Denver, Dallas and Little Rock, Ark., where I participated in trials as an expert witness, I conclude that school desegregation has been the most significant experience in educational reform this century.

Moreover, desegregated education has increased racial tolerance despite the tensions that it also has produced. This is largely because students of one racial group are able ''to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students,'' which racially isolated schools prevented, according to the Supreme Court's findings in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka.

Sociologist Nancy St. John has studied school desegregation for more than a decade. In the early 1980s she concluded that ''when school settings become more thoroughly integrated . . . all children will benefit, measurably and immeasurably.''

Certainly this has been true for some Boston whites. A school official, James Daugherty, told a newspaper reporter that few students in South Boston High went to college before school desegregation. ''The white kids downgraded themselves, felt college was too tough or that they didn't have the ability,'' he said. But when they discovered that some of their new black classmates were plan- ning to go to college, they said ''Why can't we?''

School desegregation has helped the nation to partially attain racial diversity. Through it, young people of the United States have embraced double cultures -- those of the majority and the minority.

Several years ago, University of Chicago sociologist Robert Parks said persons with these experiences have a ''wider horizon'' and a ''keener intelligence.'' His student, Everett Stonquist, author of The Marginal Man, said that in such persons ''cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment.''

Parks called double-cultured persons ''more civilized human beings.'' If school desegregation ends racial isolation, increases racial tolerance, improves academic performance, enhances self-concept and social equity, as claimed by Hawley, and also results in a more civilized and broader perspective as claimed by Parks, why do some blacks and whites insist on retribalizing our cities and suburbs by returning to separate schools?

In a course I taught a year ago, students were asked to identify the best elementary school and the best secondary school among the several case studies cited in the textbooks we were using. The consensus choices were Leif Ericson Elementary School in Chicago and Brookline High School in suburban Boston.

Ericson has a predominantly black student body but a teaching staff that is 61 percent black and 39 percent of other racial origin. Desegregation involves faculties as well as students.

In cases where the student body is more than 80 percent white or black, it is especially important that the teaching staff be fully integrated, ideally at least one-third minority but in no instance less than 20 percent. Below this 20 percent ''critical mass'' the racial minority's presence becomes little more than tokenism, too small to have an impact on the school as a social system.

Brookline High's pupils are predominantly white, but 30 percent of its student body is minority, including a sizable number of Boston blacks bused to that community daily. The headmaster at Brookline boasts that the school's diversity is the source of its strength.

Although it is easier to remain apart in the security of our separate tribal groups, we now know that such security is false in a pluralistic society. The preference of tribalism over humanity is a manifestation of ignorance, not education. It ultimately is a death wish, not a strategy for survival.